An ancient hilltop settlement in Morocco is giving up new secrets about life during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, according to archaeologists who completed a third season of digging at the site.
Excavators at Oued Beht, set on a ridge above a river in Khémisset Province, found the first solid evidence that people lived there during the second millennium BC, centuries after the settlement’s well-documented Final Neolithic phase had ended.
The Oued Beht Archaeological Project dug six new trenches from October to November 2023, building on a 2022 dig that uncovered a large farming settlement spanning nine to ten hectares (22 to 25 acres) and dated from the mid-fourth to early third millennium BC.
Stone walls and prehistoric axes unearthed in new trenches
The latest work focused on a set of massive stone walls in the site’s southern sector, long known locally as “Wall B1.”
Excavators found the structure went up in two stages, an early earth and daub version raised sometime after 2000 BC, followed centuries later by a stone wall, with a ditch and earthen embankment alongside. Seventeen new radiocarbon dates from the trench showed the complex took shape in the early to mid second millennium BC.
Archaeologists called it among the oldest confirmed constructions of its kind in the region, and evidence that a Bronze Age culture emerged in northwestern Morocco around the same time related societies were developing in southern Spain.
Medieval burials and regional survey reveal later settlement traces
In another trench near the site’s north end, excavators recovered three polished stone axes still in place below ground. It was the first time such tools have turned up intact at Oued Beht, though thousands more are thought to have been gathered from the surface there over the decades. Nearby pits held pottery and yielded radiocarbon dates from the Final Neolithic period, around 3100 to 2900 BC.
Separate trenches investigated reports from local residents about human remains found during house construction on the site’s northern edge. Excavators uncovered several burials aligned east to west, one dated by testing on a molar to between 1221 and 1279 AD.
The burial ground may span about 40 by 40 meters (131 by 131 feet) and hold hundreds of graves, though the unusual alignment left open questions about which community used it.
Morocco’s Neolithic to Bronze Age secrets come into focus
A survey of the surrounding countryside, covering 260 hectares (642 acres), found no other prehistoric sites near Oued Beht.
It did turn up a rural settlement from the 11th through 13th centuries, along with old cemeteries and a stone road. Geological surveys traced clay and stone sources that ancient residents used for pottery and tools.
The discoveries add new secrets to the story of Morocco’s shift from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age, offering rare evidence of that transition.
See all the latest news from Greece and the world at Greekreporter.com. Contact our newsroom to report an update or send your story, photos and videos. Follow GR on Google News and subscribe here to our daily email!
